The Butterfly Effect
by Primal Arc
Summary: "I ended his story thirty years ago—and yet, the ghosts remain. Ghosts are heavy. You can't see them, but you can feel them weighing you down, like chains shackled to your feet. Now I'm the only one left who can put things right again. I was the beginning... and I will be the end."
1. Chapter 1

**THE BUTTERFLY EFECT**

 **Rating:** T

 **Warnings:** suicide, alcoholism, unprocessed trauma, unhealthy coping mechanisms, violence

So I guess the FNAF games have come to an end. It's... a strange feeling, that it's over, this is it. No more secrets to find, no more stones left unturned. In the space it leaves behind, here's my obituary, my send off to the series we all know and love. I've actually been planning this story since well before Pizzeria Simulator came out, but many of the events and themes in the game coincidentally align with those featured here. I hope you all enjoy it, and I'd love to hear what you think! Reviews are always appreciated.

* * *

 **CHAPTER ONE**

* * *

It should have been an ordinary Friday night. And to most, perhaps it was. Music thumped, cars revved. Youths chattered and cheered where they gathered outside to ignore the holiday liquor ban. Here and there, very nearly in rhythm like the tock-tick of worn down clockwork, fireworks would crack and throw spears of scarlet and green between shuttered blinds. And Michael? He was busy trying not to die.

Business as usual, then.

His grip tightened around the handle of the fire axe until splinters bit into thirty year old callouses, until his knuckles stood out white on black grease and floor muck. He blessed that same muck underfoot as it muffled the thump of his boots on the tiles. Crack, bang. In the empty space between, breathing was the only sound. In, out. His, and that of an ageing building. Its ribcage creaked and groaned around him.

No sign of movement. His back peeled away from the wall as he picked out a fresh trail over the debris. Sweat, mould, and the greasy film that too many years of bad pizza left behind. He couldn't remember which restaurant this was, but his feet did, and remembered it well.

And so did his opponent. But which of them was prey?

Or maybe he shouldn't ask questions that he didn't want an answer to. He stumbled, and the steel toe of his boot caught a discarded Monster can and sent it clattering across the floor.

Fuck.

 _Th-dunk._

The light of the arcade cabinet eclipsed where it fell upon the walls, and something heavy rushed to fill the darkness left behind.

Michael leapt backwards just in time to duck the hand that smashed into the plaster. Ducked again, felt the other fist graze over his head. Felt strands of hair catch in the joints and tug free as it passed.

10,000 Newtons of force—right where his face would've been. Too close.

Shards rained down on him, dust. There was a _riiip_ as it tore itself free of the backing foam. Crack, bang, and red light caught the outline of a blunt muzzle and a crooked smile, and eyes that wanted to watch him die. He swung around, swung the axe. It glanced off the shadow of a raised arm. With a twist, it was pulled from his grip. Like candy from a goddamn baby.

The office wasn't so far, he could make it if—

The sound of wood splintering chased him into the dark. Each half whizzed past. The head, then the shaft, and they hit the walls with a clang. He caught the frame of the first door he came to and swung around into the void beyond. Even his feet couldn't tell him which room this was. Didn't matter. They all led to the office—and the door out of here—one way or another.

Someone was hammering on that door, the one he always locked behind him. The sound echoed to him from down the corridors, bang, bang, bang.

"Come on man, open up!"

Oh god, not now. Any time but _now._ Just five more minutes—he was so _close._

But not close enough. The sensation of falling hit him before the blow to the shins. His hands struck tiles, followed by his head. The crack knocked stars into his eyes. There, they wrote omens of doom.

 _Blunt force trauma detected. Assessing—_

This was it, then. Fingers dug into his shoulder, into the bone. It took only one hand to wrap completely around his neck; the last scruff of flocking scratched under his nails. This was how he failed.

This was the end of the story.

His lungs burned and he couldn't cry out. Couldn't feel his feet touching the floor. And its— _his_ —eyes burned into his own, watching the life there fade. They were blue, once. But the evil there was just the same. Bile rose in his throat at the sight of it, the smell. Rotting leather and desiccated meat, stewed, and seasoned with the dust of a crumbling book. Lips split in tatters in a mocking smile.

 _Blood oxygen at sixty percent._

 _Fifty percent._

 _Forty…_

Silence. Black crept in shadows and whispers around the edge of his vision. The drunk partygoers staggering past on the street outside would never know, never care. Mac would find the body, and sweep it under the carpet with all the rest. Was this how _they_ died?

Mac. A door banging open, someone calling his name. The crunch of a discarded can underfoot. Someone had to tell Mac to get out. His eyes closed. Get out—

 _Clang._

And then he was falling. His legs buckled underneath him. He couldn't feel the ground, but it must have been there because it hurt when it hit him in the face. He spat blood onto the dirt, sucked in greedy lungfuls of air that burned like hot ash and smoke, and his fingers closed around splintered wood.

"Please don't be dead, please tell me you're not dead—come on, get up!"

Get off me. Get out. I don't need your help. But his mouth couldn't form the words. He went to slap away the hands that pulled him up, up, and found himself clinging onto the front of Mac's T-shirt instead, up and onto his feet. Batman's face swam in his vision. The fire extinguisher rolled past, dented on one side, and told him what just happened. And then the hands pulled him away.

He didn't think Mac had it in him. If it wasn't pissed off before, it sure as hell was now.

A glance behind him, into the dark. The animatronic lurched onto its feet, smile askew, spitting static and hatred and garbled noise. Clumsy hands felt for its muzzle and pushed the pieces back into place. In that one brief moment he glimpsed teeth, and dead skin stretched taut over an empty skull. It wasn't smiling any more.

Just five more minutes! 'Exit' glared at him in green and white. He never thought he'd be so glad to see one in his life. But he still had one thing left to do. "I can walk!" Michael rasped, the words scratching at blood and bruises, both inside and out. He pushed Mac away, forward. Through the door he so recklessly left open—idiot!—and out into the cool night air.

He stopped on the threshold and turned. For a moment, a freeze frame, the world turned with him Everything pivoted on this, on the death-white lights that lunged at him from the dark. Then he slammed the door and something heavy crashed into it from the other side.

"What—what the hell was that?"

Michael didn't answer as he wedged the axe handle into the latch of the door. It rattled against the obstruction. But that wouldn't hold for long. His eyes landed on the skip, one of the smaller ones on wheels, currently overflowing with pizza boxes and the rotten cutoffs of salvaged timber. It would have to do.

"Dude—"

"Stop standing there and help me!" He pushed, pulled. "fucking—MOVE!" The edge of the skip dug into his fingers, and his heels into the earth. On loose, crumbling soil, it was reluctant to give. But Mac scurried to do as he was told, and with two people it began to move. Up onto the concrete and against the door, and with the wheels locked and wood from inside forced underneath, there was no way it would shift any time soon.

 _Vitals stabilising._

 _Blood oxygen at eighty percent._

The rattle of the door against the barricade was the only sound that cut through the fog. They stood in silence, alone with their shadows, backs to the world—and eyes on the loaded gun. But nothing came bursting through that door, and in time, even it faded. Then… stopped.

For now, they were safe.

"What… what about the other door?" Mac puffed, mopping the sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt—Michael never wanted to see that pasty beer belly again.

"Welded shut." He tested the front windows too, just to be sure. No, those boards weren't going anywhere. Of course. He installed them—it was one of Mac's few good ideas and one he was happy to oblige, albeit for different reasons than 'it'd be totally spooky, man.' "Which I would've done to this one too, if everything went according to plan."

"Plan…? You, like, knew about this… this thing?"

The silence was deafening. Mac gaped at him like a fish out of water. Michael glared back, then turned once more to the cage he built out of salvage and ruin. It took days to assemble, carefully, in the sliver of half-light between day and night, between Mac and the monster. Sharp eyes scoured the façade, checking for gaps in its armour, checking again. Why were Freddy's restaurants always so… grey? At least on the outside. And this was definitely a Freddy Fazbear's, once, he could see the outlines where the letters would have been. An F, an E, a D and Y together, marked out in paler shades of concrete. It stooped there, sagging in the middle under the weight of time, windows like eyes scrunched closed. Damp streaked tears down the walls. Over time, the rain would scrub those away too.

He always did wonder if a building knew what went on behind its doors, and hate what it had become.

"What am I supposed to do now, man?" Mac groused at him from his makeshift seat on an upturned crate, as he wrapped his fist in his jacket and smashed out one of the lower panes left uncovered. "We're opening on Monday. But I can't—with that thing in there—what do I do?"

"You consider it a lesson learned and go the fuck home. You should've left it where you found it."

"Why… why do you stink of gas? What are you—"

"I'm ending this." The wheel of the lighter was familiar under his thumb, tooth digging into the skin. The click, the crackle. The flame springing to life threw shadows over the hollows of his face, under his eyes, where the years and the hate etched themselves in lines and dark bruises. He stepped back, lit a cigarette from the inner pocket of his jacket, and dragged. Savoured the way it killed him just a little more inside. This was a moment a lifetime in the making.

A cage, a trap. An end to the story.

"Right now."

With a flick, the cigarette sailed through the broken window pane. Right into the trail of gasoline he left inside.

The building screamed. Agony, the pain of countless tiny lives, cut short too soon, and purged from its walls. The fire ripped along the line like a knife and gutted its carcass from the inside. It all spilled forth in plumes of smoke, dark, acrid, rushing out and then upwards into a waiting sky. And he breathed it in, all of it, watched the sparks and embers dance above him. Breathe in, breathe out.

"You're crazy!" Mac scrambled to his feet, watched his investment, his savings, his hopes and dreams, everything go up in flames. They were reflected in firelight in wide eyes. He backed away. "YOU'RE CRAZY!"

Michael let him go, let him storm off into the night. Ignored the way his words cut at him as they were shouted back from beyond where his eyes could reach. He stayed there, watching those embers flit like spirits into a blackened sky. Charred paper came drifting down, and Freddy's face smiled up at him in tatters from the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: I had a blast writing this one! Michael's eccentricities are entertaining. I'm really glad the Funtimes are here too, you'll be seeing (hearing?) a lot more of them from now on. I'm not normally one to ramble about headcanons, but if you're interested I added some notes at the end of the chapter about Michael and the Funtimes and how they function in this story. As always, if you like the story I really appreciate reviews and feedback. They help me to stay motivated!**

* * *

 **CHAPTER TWO**

* * *

The taxi driver stared at him when he swung open the door and hoisted the welding machine into the back seat. He stared back. "I said 42 Ansell Drive. Or do I have to fucking spell it for you?"

Silence. The man turned away again and Michael gave the machine an affectionate pat before slamming the door shut. He tried to ignore the little flinch, the way he shrank behind the wheel as he moved to the passenger door. The dart of his gaze when he yanked it open and collapsed into the seat. Red and blue flashed by in a wail of impending law enforcement, carving vampiric shadows into the sockets of Michael's eyes. He knew the sort of picture he painted, and it was titled 'slasher on the loose'.

He tossed a hundred into the driver's lap and leaned back into—sweet Christ, padded seat covers. His back hurt. His legs hurt. His general throat area hurt like a _bitch._ And, well, what didn't? If he felt like shit now, he had a date with hell in the morning.

… They still weren't moving. He cracked open an eye. "Do you want the money or not?"

Did he? The question was clear in the man's eyes. But greed won in the end—it always did—and he smoothed out the creases in the note, carefully wiped off the soot, the bloody thumbprint stamped into the paper. It occurred to Michael that it was probably the first time in at least a few weeks that he had even seen one. Then he tapped the address into his hands-free and flicked on the indicator to pull out onto the road.

 _Blood glucose low. Glycogen low. Urgent corrective action recommende_ d.

Fucking—fine, _fine._ Taxi guy looked put out as he clanked and clattered in his duffel bag and withdrew the last full bottle of Lucozade from between the tools. "You know, it's company policy not to—" But his words stuttered away at the _look_ slanted in his direction, and he went back to doing what he did best in silence.

It was piss warm. But it was pure sugar in a bottle, the worst possible thing he could put into himself short of a cup of undiluted bleach, and exactly what he needed. His fingers trembled around the bottle—his fourth one today. He ran the numbers, knew he was for all intents and purposes running an extra half a brain from his body's own energy stores, and brains were hungry organs to feed even without all the running around and the knocks to the head and the choking half to death. He'd pushed himself too hard. Worked without pause, without even stopping to eat and drink, for hours. Because he knew everything had to be ready. Because when the last ray of sunlight faded from the windows…

He almost fucked it all up, right at the very last minute.

That realisation made even sugar water taste bitter. It must have showed, in his eyes, in the lines of his face, because taxi guy opened his mouth to speak. "S—so…" He swallowed. "What's got you using a taxi on this—uh—tonight?"

"Ran out of gas," Michael grunted, fully aware that he did in fact smell very strongly of gasoline. The man's eyes flicked to him in alarm.

Sirens—perfect timing. Another patrol car screamed by. A fire truck too, screaming, screaming, and chasing it into the rolling bank of smoke. He'd lost count by now. Maybe he overdid it. Maybe it was spreading to other buildings. But the fireworks stopped when the fire started, if only because there was no possible way to outdo it so they might as well all go home, and for that he was thankful. He had every cause to celebrate, and yet doing so just felt… wrong.

No one spoke. Now that he had to make peace with driving an arsonist away from the scene of the crime, taxi guy zipped up like a grandma's purse for the rest of the ride. That was fine. Michael leaned over to prod at the gash on his forehead in the wing mirror, frowning. It was deep; a dried crust of blood ran down into his eyebrow. He couldn't remember what he hit it on but it probably wasn't hygienic. His frown only deepened as he pulled the collar of his jacket away from the welts on his neck, red and angry and most definitely finger-shaped. A bruise was already starting to bloom where the thumb dug in. He'd be black and blue all over by morning.

Morning. His lips twisted. The first day of the rest of his life.

He pretended not to notice the way the other man's eyes lingered on the marks and softened. They came first to Ansell Drive, an old street with old trees and creaky houses huddled in their shadows, then to number 42. Its trees were pruned, the hedgerows trimmed and lawn neat, and a white picket fence separated it from the potholes on the road. It looked freshly painted. He stared out at it for a long time, at its four little windows all curtained and dark, its panelled front door with the stained glass insert, the flowers in their pots by the doorstep.

"Thanks," he said at last, digging in his pocket for another hundred and flicking it onto the dashboard as he pushed his way out of the door. "Take the rest of the night off, spend some damn time with your family. You never miss it until it's gone." He staggered when his feet hit the sidewalk. Grimaced as he limped to the back door and dragged the welder back out onto the street. He was about to slam it shut again when a voice stopped him.

"Hey." The driver looked back at him strangely. It was… almost a smile, he supposed. Maybe the sort that said that he didn't know what to think of him, that his perceptions had been challenged on this star-crossed night, and that he had some thinking to do when he got home to whomever was waiting for him. Or not. He'd never been good with people. "I… you too. Happy new year."

Michael didn't smile in return. But he did nod before he shut the door. Shut it, not slammed it. And he stood there as the car rumbled and turned away, duffel bag in one hand and welder in the other, silhouetted against the light as it grew smaller, smaller, and disappeared into the night. And when it was gone, he shouldered his bag and walked to number 52.

The driveway was long and dark, and crunched off-rhythm under his aching feet. Hedges of English yew pressed in around him, wild, untouched by human hands or tools for at least twenty years. The trees here were the oldest of all, and there between them, beneath the boughs of a cherry tree that had stood for longer still, was a villa. It would have been a nice place, once. Now it was just… a place. It didn't have a neat lawn or a white picket fence, or a little window in the door. Its porch sagged, and the paint peeled in big ugly scabs from its boards. But it was the place he called home.

His boots thudded on the stairs, the porch, then the doorstep. He heard barking inside as the keys jingled in his fingers. Into the lock, click. He breathed in, then let it all out and swung the door open. He set one foot inside. _Thump._

This time it was the booming of a doberman or other equally large dog that sounded out from within the house, and much, much closer. "Foxy!" He hissed with a placating gesture into the dark. "It's me, you idiot!"

"And where have _you_ been?"

Oh. He grimaced. "A hello would've been nice."

"A _note_ would have been nice! You can't just lock us in the system and disappear without a word, something could have happened, Freddy could have—"

Her voice was velvet, even when she was furious. And shit—was she. She'd slap the nonsense out of him right there and then if she could. He dragged the welder inside while she listed all the many and varied things that might have gone wrong in his absence, and stood it in the corner before shutting the door behind him.

"You're not even listening to me, are you?"

"I'm afraid not," he smirked up into the camera mounted down the hallway.

" _Michael!"_

"I didn't want you to worry."

"Worry? I was worried sick! I'm accustomed to you coming and going at whatever odd hour you please, but you have always given at least some warning—" Ballora hesitated. The red light on the camera blinked at him in surprise as it tracked him down the corridor to the bathroom. "Michael, what happened? You're…"

"I set everything up to unlock automatically," he said, distracted, as he dropped the bag to the floor with a clank. The jacket went next, into an unceremonious pile. He wasn't sure if the stains were dirt from that raging dumpster fire Mac called an 'attraction', or if they were blood—or whose, for that matter. Scraped and blackened fingers hunted for the light switch in the bathroom and he blinked owlishly when it clicked on. Uuuuuuuugh. "If I didn't come back in three days—"

"I—IT'S THE B—BIRTHDAY BOY! HELLOOO MIKEY, Y—YOU'RE LATE FOR YOUR OWN PARTY!"

"Inside voice, Freddy—uh, in three days you would've been let out of the system, given free access to everything." He twisted the hot tap onto full blast and left it running as he went hunting for antiseptic under the vanity. Drawers clattered and banged. He was sure he had some in here somewhere… and where the hell did he put the roll of gauze? Oh, there. "And I left a video for you, just in case— _Jesus!"_ He yanked his hand back from the sink and sucked on now scalded fingers until he remembered that they were still covered in blood. "Fucking—uh, just in case I never came back, it would've explained everything."

"Michael…" Ballora's voice was softer now, concerned. A verbal hand on his shoulder, to take the place of the physical one she couldn't yet give him.

"And all the blueprints for your new frames, so you could maybe finish them yourselves—"

"You… did it, didn't you?" Just five little words. Yet they hung over him like a judge's gavel, and the room, the world, held its breath. Watching, waiting for the answer to a thirty year old question.

"…He's gone."

The bottle of antiseptic shook in Michael's hands, the little measuring spoon… he gave up and tipped what looked vaguely like the right amount into the sink. No amount of scrubbing would cleanse the blood from the callouses, the cracked skin, from under his nails. Hands stained red, just like his father. But at least this blood was his own. He glanced up, up into the mirror. Into the pale eyes staring back at him, wild, savage, and the same blue as _his._ The same face, the same red hair. It was the lines carved into him by years and bitterness, the dark circles under his eyes, that made him Michael. And as the the mirror steamed over, those lines and shadows faded away until it was _him_ looking back. Laughing. Mocking him. His lips twisted. "He's gone. For good, this time."

But his legacy remained. His weapon.

He wrung out the cloth and washed the blood from his face, his wounds. Chemical burning stripped him to the core. Pain was good, it reminded him that he was alive. And it was cathartic. A cleansing of all that remained of the man who made him. But he couldn't keep his face from twisting into a grimace, the hiss that escaped between his teeth.

"Can… you l—let us out n—now?"

Freddy sounded different when he was quiet. "Ah, yeah. Give me a second." A gauze on the worst injuries, and he was done. He didn't know why he stayed to watch all the crimson drain away. But when it was gone, all of it, he stumped away into the main room.

He hesitated to call it the living room, though that was its intended and original purpose, because at this point most of it was taken over by a sprawling mass of computers and monitors linked together and there was nowhere really to do any living. Not outside of the system, at least. Inside, it was the only life the animatronics had.

One node was active. He went to the keyboard balanced haphazardly on top of its tower, because the desk was swallowed into the rest of the organism a long time ago, and tapped out a command into the dialogue box he left open. The bathroom light flickered—he really needed to look into that wiring—and the rest hummed to life. "There," he said, stepping back. "You're good to go."

"YAAAY! I c—call dibs!"

The little rover parked between the towers whirred into action and zoomed away, barking.

"N—no! You can't do that F—Foxy, I called d—dibs! I wanna drive!"

"Play nice, children," said Michael, stepping over the rover as it did wheelies in the middle of the floor to the trumpeting of defiant elephants, and drifted into the kitchen. He found a half-eaten can of tuna when he opened the fridge, and it passed the sniff test as far as he could tell. And there was a jar of cheese spread.

"Are you all right?"

He'd… planned to sit down and talk with all three of them, together. Tonight. Discuss what would happen next, make plans. But Ballora knew him too well by now. "As good as I'll ever be, I suppose." He upended the tuna into a bowl and added some cheese. After a moment's pause, he scooped out the rest and tossed the empty jar into the sink with a well-practised underhand.

"You don't seem… happy."

Well, he wasn't. He wasn't sure how he felt. He'd choreographed this moment very carefully in his head in the days leading up to the arson, and he'd pictured a sort of grand elation, a symbolic breaking of the chains he'd dragged around almost since birth. He thought he _would_ be happy. Instead, he just felt… numb, like he'd wake up tomorrow and go to work, and the whole thing was a dream.

"I… guess this isn't how I pictured it ending," he admitted as he scrabbled round in the pantry for something to complete his weird fish… work in progress. It was empty save for some cobwebs, but he did find a bottle of hot sauce. Weird fish salsa, then. "Shit, when I burned it all down, I thought maybe… I'd see _them_."

She said nothing, but she knew precisely who he was talking about. She only watched as he upended what was left of the sauce into the bowl, too. "Ascending to the heavens," he continued, and took a mouthful. His nose crinkled reflexively. Edible. That's all that really mattered right now. "Or walking into the white light. I don't know, something?"

"And what did happen?"

He threw up his hands at the camera in defeat. "I don't know! Nothing?"

And that's what really got to him. The uncertainty. He was a problem solver, an engineer. He liked having all the variables, all the pieces to the puzzle. This… it was like trying to finish a thousand piece jigsaw, but every single one was blank. He could put them together but he would never know if they were the right ones in the right places until it was too late.

Too late for what? He didn't know that, either.

"What are you going to do now?"

Michael wolfed down what was left of the fish salsa, made a face, and set the bowl aside. "I could do this place up. Make it look like a house instead of a hovel," he offered, staring up at a patch on the ceiling left by a leak at some point in the past, "and I have all the time in the world to work on your platforms."

"I would like that." He could hear the smile in her voice. And then it was gone. "Michael, your phone is ringing."

It took him several minutes of turning the kitchen upside down to remember that he left his phone in the duffel bag. By the time he upended the whole damn thing on the floor and sorted through the hammers and screwdrivers and empty bottles of Lucozade, his good mood was soured. Even more so when he saw the name on the missed call alert.

Mac.

"Oh, fuck off!" He threw the phone onto the side table and stormed off, crashed down onto the couch. It groaned beneath him and popped a few springs. Whatever—the last thing he wanted to deal with right now was Mac and his whining and his stupid Cool Dude™ schtick. And probably legal action. He did kind of burn his debut enterprise down. It was something he could easily settle out of court, but he had a headache and could something go the way he planned for just one day? His eyes closed. _Please._

"Mikey?"

"I'm fine, Freddy," he muttered, fumbling in his jacket for a cigarette. Except he wasn't wearing it. It was still on the floor in the hallway, and of course his smokes were in the pocket. Fuck it. He wasn't getting up now. "Just… it's been a long day."

"Foxy w—won't share the car, can I play on y—your computer?"

"You can do whatever you like as long as I can't hear you."

He felt the monitor flick on in his bedroom more than he saw it, as his eyes remained obstinately screwed shut. Talking could wait until tomorrow. He felt blindly for the coffee table, until his hand closed around the squared-off shape of a familiar bottle.

"Michael…"

"I need this," he snapped at the dark.

"You need rest, and a proper meal. If you keep going like this—"

He opened his eyes, scowled at the ceiling. At the stains of cigarette smoke and despair, the cobwebs, the bulb hanging bare on its frayed cord. And the camera watching him. "Valkyrie, status readout."

 _Analysing._

 _Blood glucose stabilising. Glycogen low._

 _Blood oxygen at eighty percent._

 _Damage detected in left kidney. Damage detected in right kidney. Damage detected in liver, cirrhosis possible. Analysing._

 _Cirrhosis detected in liver._

"Okay okay, that's enough. I can take a hint." He ran a trembling hand over his face. God, he was tired. And not the sort of tired that sleep alone could fix. It was in his bones, his soul. He'd been fighting for so long that he didn't know how to stop any more. But he was made that way, wasn't he?

Ballora couldn't hear the diagnosis, but she guessed from the look on his face that it was grim. "It's not too late," she murmured, "you can still stop this."

"Yeah, well, I did what I set out to do, so maybe I don't care if I drink myself into an early grave."

"You might not care… but… other people do."

She did. She meant that _she_ cared. And Freddy, and Foxy. He knew all too well that they wouldn't be able to get by without him, not yet. That was a slim hope, a branch thrown to a drowning man, just enough to get him to Fazbear's Fright that one last time and do what he had to. His mouth turned down at the corners, and he pushed the Jack Daniels away.

"I'm calling it a night," he announced, fumbling for the loose charging cable he always left by the couch—because he ended up crashing on it more often than the bed—and felt over the implant at the base of his skull until he found the port. He needed Valkyrie to patch him up as much as possible overnight, and even with food in his belly the risk of running out of energy reserves was too high for his liking. "Valkyrie, put yourself into recovery mode—and don't even think about waking me up unless it's for a good fucking reason. That goes for you lot, too."

 _Acknowledged._

"Night night, Mikey!"

"Goodnight."

"Borf borf!"

He rolled over on the cushions until he came face to face with the photo on the coffee table. The frame was silver, thick with patina in all the whorls and grooves of its design. An ugly, old-fashioned thing, just the way father liked it. The faces that smiled out at him were long gone, now: a kind-eyed woman he barely resembled, a smattering of young children who all had red hair, bar one. Right in the middle, an eleven year old Michael with his arms around everyone. His eyes were still wild, even then, but they crinkled in a smile. And at his side…

His face twisted, and he turned the photo down on the table so he didn't have to look at it any more. "Goodnight."

* * *

 **A/N: So one thing that really, REALLY bothered me about Sister Location was how ridiculous the premise is, as well as the bizarre change in tone. Plus, an undead protagonist wouldn't work with the story I'm trying to tell here. So I've changed things up in TBE to make more sense, to me at least.**

 **I can't go into a lot of detail since this stuff is covered in a later chapter and I don't want to spoil anything, but I thought that the animatronics loading up all their AIs into implants and putting them into Michael was a more believable way to handle the 'scooping'. Of course, this has some... implications for his physiology. The brain uses 20% of the body's energy on its own, and with the sentient robots he's essentially running four brains plus an extra half for Valkyrie. He'd have to eat CONSTANTLY to maintain that kind of output. My solution is that they can jump from him to other systems through the port in his cybernetics, so spend most of their time in a computer network in his house. Incidentally, that's why they're currently disembodied: their old shells are still lying around at Circus Baby's somewhere.**

 **Funtime Foxy can't speak, but they can make animal noises. I hope it comes across clearly that all the weird barking and borfing is Foxy!**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: My apologies for the delay on this chapter, I've been busy for the last month or so and struggling with writer's block. I hope it was at least worth the wait! If you enjoy this story, I'd love to hear what you think. Reviews and critique are always appreciated.**

* * *

 **CHAPTER THREE**

* * *

It was cold that night. At first, that was all he remembered.

It came to him in pieces, in ones and twos and then in threes. Snowflakes dancing on black windows. Hot punch clutched in two small hands in a red solo cup, the warmth of pizza grease slick under his fingers. It was a special night. He recalled a forest of black-trousered legs around him. But no names, no faces.

Except… one.

"Charlie?" His voice echoed back to him from party rooms that were dark and empty. Because this was a special party, just for grown ups, and they didn't paint masks or make paper pals, or even eat the pizza. They just stood around and… talked. His lips tugged down at the corners. It was boring. "Come on, you won hide and seek ages ago. Can we do something else?"

He expected her to jump, grinning, from her hiding place, like she always did. And she always shouted "boo!". Then he would have to pick dust and lint and whatever else from her mane of brown curls before father saw and had to do it, because he was never as gentle as Michael. But she didn't, and it was with a frown now that he returned to where there was light and noise and idle chatter that didn't interest him. He was only here because father was too.

There were other children of course, most younger than him, all here as luggage to important parents and as bored as he was. And bored children were mean. Michael could tell from the looks on their faces that they did something, knew something. Little smirks darted in his direction in the split second he caught them looking. But they couldn't act on it with his father in earshot—his voice carried over all the adults whose names he didn't know.

"Ah, it really is hard to believe that it's been ten years already, is it not? My how time flies."

… At least Michael had the animatronics to keep him company, he thought sourly as he shuffled up to the stage, though they were switched off for the night. But were they? Freddy's eyes weren't fixed on the far wall as they should be, but on him. And the bear was shivering. And it was cold in here, now that the thought occurred to him, uncomfortably so. He huddled deeper into the stupid blazer that father made him wear, but nothing could keep out the feeling of snowflakes hitting his skin.

"May the next ten go as… smoothly."

"Save her," said Freddy in a voice that was familiar, but not his, and blood trickled from the whites of his eyes. Michael turned.

The room was empty. Snow drifted in through the open front door, out of a darkness that frightened him in ways he couldn't explain and onto the floor, the tables, onto discarded cups and paper plates. He caught sight of the hem of a black coat whisking around the corner and out of sight. Down the side alley, he remembered, the one with the dumpster where they threw out all the pizza that wasn't finished. "… Father?" He called out, uncertain, but he didn't come back.

Why would he leave him here alone?

He trailed after him, shuddering at the slip slap of his shoes in something wet that ran from the stage and pooled in all the cracks between the tiles. And there he stopped. His whole world ended where the last red footprint did, there on the threshold. Nothing waited for him beyond that door but the dark, and a familiar song plucked out on a music box he once knew.

 _My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor…_

"Mike?"

He was standing, wasn't he? But that was the ceiling above him, swimming in and out of focus. His hand shifted, and his knuckles caught on scratchy, threadbare carpet. On a square bottle he vaguely remembered wasn't on the floor before. There was no snow, no blood. And there in the corner, clinging onto shadows and spider webs, was a small figure with limbs that were too long and too thin. Watching him from empty eyes, and a face of metal that glinted dully in the thin trickle of moonlight from the window—frozen for all time into an open-mouthed scream.

 _It was taller by half than the old man himself, though it weighed not a pennyweight more…_

"You're dreaming about it again, aren't you?" Charlie's voice said, but the screaming mouth never once moved. "It's okay. Go back to sleep."

He didn't mean to. Really, he thought, he ought to investigate this strange new personal demon that had taken up residence on the ceiling. But his eyes closed in spite of himself, and he slept.

* * *

Maybe Ballora was right. Maybe all it took to start feeling something like human again was some sleep, and a good meal. He couldn't say for sure that he really slept, in all honesty, because he was stiffer than a freshly dug up corpse and everything kind of blurred together until he knocked back a gallon of coffee. And three Double Quarter Pounders with extra cheese probably didn't count as a good meal.

Baby steps, Michael.

"—And then he yelled 'you're crazy, man!' and stormed off. Probably to smoke a blunt." After some rattling around in an overflowing tool chest, he finally picked out the screwdriver he wanted—jeweller's, #0000—and turned back to the more important task at hand; bitching. "Talk about gratitude, right?"

Foxy gave him their 'oh my god, tell me about it' face, despite not yet actually having a face, and held their arm out at a better angle for him to access. He did wonder if being tinkered with while active hurt, or tickled, or both, but it didn't seem to bother them and it made things so much quicker when he could see the results in real time.

"Some people just—there we go. Okay," he said around the screwdriver in his teeth, "flex."

Foxy moved each of the fingers of their bare new hand in turn, then all together. Then, with the pricked ears and lolling smile of a dog discovering a brand new toy, brought pinky and thumb together in an 'O'. They would never have been able to do that in that piece of shit plastic eggshell they were trapped inside before, and while he had yet to build much on the end of the neck stump beyond two ears and eyes on a stick, he could read the joy there all the same.

He leaned in closer and scrutinised the tug, click, and release of every synthetic tendon. Countless actuators that whirred and whined, little marvels he could pick up with a pair of tweezers, built right here in his goddamn garage. He couldn't deny the sadistic pleasure of writing his father's work out of history with his own. Of the knowledge that when future generations spoke the name Afton, it would not be William on their lips, but _Michael._

But it wasn't perfect yet. He exchanged the screwdriver for a fresh cigarette and bent over to tighten the tiny screws that set the tension on the knuckles, just as his phone started to buzz on the worktable. "God fucking—can someone else get that?"

"I'm afraid that the only other person currently with a pair of hands is unable to speak," came the dry tone of Ballora's voice from the camera on the rear wall.

Shit.

"Here, hold this." He pushed the screwdriver into Foxy's grip and stood up. "And don't bloody chew on it."

Thankfully, they were content testing their newfound manual dexterity by twirling it between their fingers, so he picked his way over discarded McDonald's wrappers to the table and ran a baleful eye over the caller ID. Mac. Again.

He… wasn't going to give up, was he?

Michael sighed, ran his hand through his hair, over the scars that ridged his scalp and the back of his neck. This wasn't a problem he could leave on voicemail forever. He knew that. At some point, he was going to have to pick up that call and get ready to peel open his wallet. Just… why did it have to be now?

His thumb hit answer.

"How much?" He snapped, hated the harsh scratch of his own voice, hated how… tired he sounded.

"I—what?"

"How much for the building? Why else would you be calling me at Every Bloody Hour O' Clock?"

"Uh—dude—insurance already got it, I just… I just wanted to talk."

"Talk?" Michael scowled, remembered that Mac couldn't actually see it, and leaned back on the worktable. "Alright. We're talking."

He heard Mac let out the breath he was holding. "Like… I meant in person."

"I'm kind of busy." Foxy still sat waiting patiently on their stool, bless them, and looked about as pleased at the thought of leaving things half-finished as he did. They exchanged glances of 'did he just' and 'can you believe the nerve of this guy', and he added, "can you call back later? Or, hey, not at all?"

"Look—about last night, like, I feel like I walked into something way over my head—"

"You did."

"—And I think you owe me… some kind of explanation? At least? Like… was torching my freakin' business the only way to, like, fix things?"

"In case you didn't notice, _pal,_ I stopped your idiot ass from unleashing the furry Terminator on thousands of oblivious and helpless people!"

Damn it. Michael knew he was shouting. He knew it frightened Freddy, and Ballora, and sometimes the young kids who lived next door when they played outside. But he couldn't stop the anger, the words, as they bubbled up like magma from a volcano and spilled out. Hissing, spitting, furious.

He pushed away from the table and ignored the bang and the clatter of tools knocked loose and onto the floor. Strode to the garage door, open all the way to tempt in the hope of a breeze despite the cold. It was a beautiful day. The sun was pale and clear, and glittered on grass still crisp with morning frost now fading into midday. Soon enough the cherry would bloom, dusting his little cottage in white and pink. Like an iced cake.

… Deep breaths. He dragged on his cigarette, puffed it back out, watched the smoke coil sluggishly away into the winter. "Reckon I saved you a jail sentence for manslaughter at the very least. You're welcome, by the way. So as far as I'm concerned, we're even and I don't owe you a goddamn thing."

"Well, uh, there's one uh, teensy tiny… problem."

Another drag. "Everything you do is a problem," he retorted, watching as Foxy set aside the jeweller's screwdriver and picked through the other tools on the bench beside them. Because they had hands now, and by god they were going to _use_ them, and there wasn't much Michael nor anyone else could say to convince them otherwise. They selected the bent and slightly flattened piece of pipe he used to wedge the door open when he needed ventilation but the weather was shit, and felt its weight in their new appendages. A few test swings and a cheeky glance of 'we should totally beat him up' flashed his way did manage to squeeze a smile from his drawn features.

"I, um, I was kinda angry last night."

"Join the club."

"And I like maybe kinda called the police. So that's… something we're going to have to deal with."

… Fuck.

* * *

"... And that's why you make sure the bear is hibernating _before_ you start shaving," Michael finished, then stuffed an entire caramel doughnut into his mouth.

Twelve cops laughed. Mac broke out into a nervous sweat.

Because one tiny little detail Michael 'forgot' to tell him was that he and the chief—Curt Howard, impressive constitution, even more impressive beard—were on first name basis, as he was with the chief before him. Maybe the first time they dragged him, sooty and snarling, into the station, when he was still young enough to believe that violence and zeal were the answers to all problems… he would've believed in justice, too.

Because it's not like Fazbear's Fright was his first run in with the law. Not his tenth, or even fifteenth. And now he dropped by from time to time to settle his tab, just like daddy taught him.

Besides, he was having the time of his life watching Mac shit bullets. His eyes kept flicking to his ugly-ass Focus parked just outside— the one with 'Fazbear's Fright' still written in Bleeding Cowboys on the hood. Could he be any more fucking obvious that he had weed stashed in the glovebox?

"I guess you could say it was _bear naked,"_ one of the sergeants chimed in, and they all laughed again.

"I don't know how you get yourself into these situations," said Curt, clapping him on the shoulder as he passed, "or out of them, for that matter. Duty calls—be more careful where you stop for a smoke next time." They exchanged winks, and the whole goddamn entourage filed out of the shop.

So that left him, and Mac. Because your average Joe could take a hint when the entirety of the local constabulary came barging in through the door.

Mac was one of those few who could not. He was still transfixed on the window where the shadows of the last two stragglers remained, making fun of his car. When at last they wandered out of view, like sharks from the glass of a fish trapped in the same aquarium, Mac turned staring eyes on him. His mouth opened, shut, opened again. "So… so you just bribe your way out of trouble?" He sounded equal parts hurt and bewildered, but the accusing tone was there. A pointed finger shaped out of words.

For a long time Michael said nothing. What was there to say? It wasn't even a question, because the answer was already obvious. So he watched, and waited to see if any more questions would fall out of that big dumb mouth, and when none did he shoved one of the boxes across the table at him. "Have a doughnut."

"I don't—"

"Take a _fucking doughnut, Mac."_

His eyes darted up at him, at his face chiselled out of gaunt shadows from the setting sun, and he snatched up the first one his fingers met and shrank just a little more in his chair. Backed into the very corner of his tank, now, because there was nothing but sharks in this aquarium. And this one was the meanest of them all.

He wound his knuckles together on the table the way the chief did when he dragged him in from the ashes of Freddy's, the way _he_ did when he wanted people to know those hands had blood on them. When he wanted to be able to lean over and see the fear in their eyes, and grab them by the handful by the front of their shirt. "You think I make the rules?" He said, and he was pretty sure those exact words came out of _his_ mouth once, too. "You think I like this? Think I wouldn't rip them out of the rulebook if I could?"

Mac pressed his lips into a pale line and shook his head.

"Worse people than me walked away because of those rules. You think I like that?" Discarded cake forks jumped on their plates when he slammed a hand onto the table and Mac jumped. _"Do you?"_

"I—I—"

But he wasn't done yet. No—he was just warming up. The blood boiled in his veins, he could hear the thump of it in his ears. War drums, maddening, driving out all that was left of him that wasn't wrath. The call to arms. "You, and your shitty horror maze," he snarled, jabbing a finger out through the window at that hideous car, and its hideous logo, and everything that it stood for, "are here because that man walked, do you understand that? Those kids you're ripping off? They. Were. _Real."_

Grab him by the shirt _,_ whispered that little voice in his head. And god, it would be so easy, he'd only have to shake him a little, and he would be a filthy liar if he said he didn't want to. Because it wasn't Mac's car or even his stupid face he hated, but the fact that when he looked at Freddy's, he didn't see a grave. He saw a goldmine.

"They should be my age now, just about." 'Should'—the word sounded, tasted, wrong. A bitter pill. All he wanted to say was their names, and they were there, right there on the tip of his tongue. He forced himself to swallow. "They should have jobs, and houses, and kids of their own. And you—you wanted to build an empire on their bones." His lips twisted.

Do it, the little voice said. Punish him. His nails bit into the table, still red underneath with blood.

"I'm… I'm sorry, I didn't—"

The chair shrieked across the tiles when he lurched to his feet. "And you couldn't have left things the fuck alone when you didn't even know the full story? You had to go digging up their graves, too?"

"But—no one does!" Mac clutched after him, like a liar at a straw. Or like a greedy sack of shit at a dollar fluttering in the wind. Because the only reason he even wanted an explanation out of him was to profit off it, right? "Nobody knows what happened!"

Michael's eyes flashed in the light of the dying sun. "I do."

He towered over the other man. That… didn't come with the rush he thought it would. He thought he'd enjoy it, watching him shrank back in his shadow, seeing him look small and powerless. How Mac ever managed to drag his half-conscious ass out of Fazbear's Fright, he'd never—

His fingers curled, and then he let them fall.

"Then, like, why can't you talk about it? I don't know, maybe it sounds stupid, but…" Mac spread his hands in an odd little twitch of a half-shrug, an apology, maybe, both for what he did and what he was about to say. And still Michael didn't move. "Maybe if we, y'know, talk about it, I can do something to help?"

"Help?" The word rang hollow in his ears. "What the hell could you do? It's your fault we're even in this mess."

There, he said it. It didn't change a damn thing, and Michael couldn't even feel satisfied, vindicated, for lashing out with the stick of blame. Because he knew it was never Mac he was angry with in the first place.

He flushed, but made no move to stop him as he strode to the door. "Mike—"

"It doesn't matter—it's done."

"Come on—"

And he slammed it behind him, hard enough to knock the 'open' sign from the glass.

Past Fazbear's Focus, to the seedy little used whiteware store around the corner where he parked his truck. Fumbled with the keys until the blood pressure mounted to a whistle in his ears. Into the lock, click, into the seat. _Slam_. He jabbed at the radio, but he didn't know what he was looking for, and threw the car into reverse long before he found it.

He supposed he should've been worried that he couldn't remember any of the drive home. But he only had one thing on his mind when he threw the door open and staggered inside.

"Michael?"

He ignored Ballora, ignored Foxy's insistent yaps, the ensuing bickering with Freddy. Down the hallway to the bathroom. Hands braced on the sink, afraid of what he'd find when he looked in the mirror. Because when his heart raced and his blood pumped, and the adrenaline burned like gasoline in his veins, that little voice always sounded like… _him._

But it was just Michael looking back. Pissed off and… scared.

And why wouldn't it be, he thought as he collapsed onto the same damn couch as always and ran trembling hands over his face. Did he expect the vengeful revenant of his father's crimes to come creeping like oil through his veins in the night, corrupting him, twisting him into its likeness? He was gone. He couldn't touch him any more—him, or anyone else.

"You're not going to turn into your father just because you're angry."

"Ballora," he said through his fingers, "I wanted to _hit him."_

"Well, he does sound rather irritating," she said primly.

"Christ—"

"Everyone feels angry sometimes, Michael. What's important is that you're working on it, and you're getting better. And you didn't hit him, so you're already a better man than… _he_ could ever have been."

"Why do you always have to be right?" He groused, reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels that had somehow rolled under the coffee table, as if in hope that he wouldn't see it there, before he remembered what was said last night and left it where it fell.

"You can have one glass—but only one."

There was one on top of the rack of vinyls that looked… clean enough. "I'll make it a shot." He raised the bottle to the camera in a toast. "Man's honour."

"I shall hold you to it."

Her words hung in the room, in the silence. The last few rays of golden sunlight reached in through the crack in the curtains and picked out dust in the air. Then it moved away from the window and slipped below the shadows of the trees, and left him there, alone with the twilight and with six pairs of eyes smiling from an ugly silver frame.

His eyebrows creased in a frown. He distinctly remembered turning that face down the night before. The filigree, the glass, felt smooth under the split skin of his thumb as he brushed dust away from their faces. Their names were still there, waiting to be spoken out loud… Mara, Edmund, Charles, Elizabeth, Michael too, with his wild blue eyes, and… Charlie.

He didn't smile as he set the photo down. But he did fish his phone from the pocket of his jeans and dial Mac's number.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: This chapter is short, and reeeally late. Unfortunately I was busy with commissions and convention prep this month and had barely any time for writing. Hopefully we're back on track now!**

 **I vote Funtime Freddy as MVP this chapter, he truly went above and beyond.**

* * *

 **CHAPTER FOUR**

* * *

"You, like, only have to push the doorbell once, y'know."

Michael pressed it three more times while looking him dead in the eye. Sighing now, Mac fumbled with the chain, and with some clattering and swearing he at last creaked the door open just wide enough for him to step inside.

He didn't. Because Mac took long enough to get his ass downstairs that he lit a smoke to pass the time—not to ease the tremor in his hands, he told himself—and he was damn well going to finish it. So he leaned there on the railing, picking off bits of ice with his nails and flicking them at his shadow where it hunched over the empty street, waiting. Waiting for him to come back and hunt. Mirrors could lie. People could, too, to make him feel better about himself. Shadows could not.

"Nice apartment," he said, blandly. "I like the dead pot plants."

"Thanks," came the answer. "I killed them myself. Now c'mon, my legs are getting cold."

Michael eyed him, puffing smoke from his nose like a dragon. Mac was already in his PJs. Given that his day clothes were also a T-shirt and shorts, the only real difference was that he had decided to accessorise with a ratty old bathrobe. Risqué. "Maybe you should wear actual pants, then."

"Mike!"

But he'd already turned back to what he was doing and his next projectile hit its mark. Boom, headshot. The shadow, of course, didn't react in any way, and he was starting to lose feeling in his fingers. "Fine, whatever," he groused, stubbing out his cigarette on the railing and tossing it into the dead rhododendron's pot as he stepped inside.

"Are you a vampire? Because I like already did the inviting you inside thing. Several times."

"You salted the doorstep and I had to summon all of my infernal power to cross it." Michael shook the snowflakes out of his hair and jacket and made his way, uninvited, through to what he assumed was the living room. He assumed correctly.

It looked about the same as what he'd expect from a new suburb terraced house. Compact, efficient, everything painted white. No personality at all. But Mac was good at asserting his personality onto things he really shouldn't, and more than compensated with the random assortment of objects he chose to clutter it with. There was a claymore hanging over the fireplace with a piece of silly string still caught on the crossguard, well out of reach. Odd socks littered the floor. And there was a bookshelf with no books to speak of, only comics. Well worn, he noted, thumbed through frequently and without care for their future value.

" _Wow!"_ Said Funtime Freddy in his ear, and he scowled. It wasn't _that_ much nicer than his place.

Well, sure, there was actually pile on the carpet, and framed pictures on the walls. And the couches didn't sag. He decided to remedy this by immediately flopping down on one and putting his feet up on the armrest. Better.

"Good to see you making yourself at home." Mac ran a hand over his short scruff of beard. "Y'know, when you said you were coming over, I didn't think you meant, like, _now."_

"I always mean now. Foresight is for people who give a shit."

" _Don't all humans give 'shits'? When y—you eat food and then you have to—"_ Freddy chipped in again, and Foxy burst out into laughter. Or, well, dolphin noises.

" _Freddy!"_ Ballora gasped. _"Language!"_

" _W—what?"_

With all that racket in Michael's head, he was pretty sure he was starting up with a migraine. And his eye was twitching. And he couldn't tell them to knock it off without looking stark, raving mad. It was tempting to yank out the cable running under his jacket to the hard drive in his pocket. Instead, he said to the ceiling, "what's there for a man to drink around here?"

Mac shrugged. "Water."

Michael raised his head to glare at him over his feet.

"Or maybe coffee is more your style."

"Good man."

"At this time of night? Sheesh, do you like ever sleep?"

"Only on the holy days when my powers wane."

"Is instant okay? I, like, totally don't wanna start up the machine right now."

"I retract my previous compliment." He let his head fall back to the armrest with a groan. "Ugh, fine. Make it black."

" _What do you say, Michael?"_

He made a face like he was being force-fed lemons. "Please."

Freddy and Foxy soon complained of being bored of looking at the ceiling, so he rolled over to consider the Infinity Gauntlet surrounded by empty Monster cans on the coffee table. He found that he could knock them over with discarded receipts screwed up into balls, and it was on this fast-paced new sport of taking bets on how many cans he could topple at once that Mac returned with coffee, cookies, and some sort of cake thing that looked past its best.

"You can't keep still, can you?"

"I'll rest when I'm dead."

Trying, and failing, to find a spot on the table to put the mugs and plates, Mac opted to sweep off the remainder of the cans—eclipsing Michael's record of four—and set them down on the sliver of free space exposed. "That's Oreo slice," he said, pointing to the cake thing.

"It looks like dried shit pressed into a loaf tin."

" _Michael."_

"Thanks," he said, even more sourly. But he was thinking 'fuck you', and maybe if he thought it hard enough she would hear him.

Mac eyed him over this strange and sudden new development of manners, but wisely said nothing, and retreated to the comfy armchair directly facing him. "So," he said, sipping from his mug.

"So."

"You're… going to tell me, like, everything, right?"

Michael sat up and reached for his own mug. "Everything," he answered, amiably, after only a moment's hesitation. It was too easy these days, to pretend. Elizabeth would be proud of him. The lines around his mouth deepened. _He_ would be proud of him. "From what I had for breakfast on the day it all started, to the number of hairs on Freddy's butt-chin."

" _H—hey!"_

" _... Are you really?"_

Absolutely not, he thought, and maybe it was something to do with chemicals in his bloodstream, or the way his face moved when he thought about _him_ , but that time he knew that Ballora heard it.

 **1993**

"I would fire an employee for speaking to me like that, Mr. Schmidt."

Michael shot him a razor-lipped smile. "But you said in your advertisement that you appreciate honesty in the workplace."

It's not like the man was in the position to be making threats—everyone knew Freddy Fazbear's was on its deathbed. Maybe if he had an ounce of feeling left in him, it would hurt to watch it die. The place where he grew up. The place that raised him. But this wasn't _that_ restaurant. It wasn't, and never would be, because Fredbear and Friends was already long gone.

He wasn't going to mourn a trademark, a company. And he wasn't fucking blind. He didn't need the peeling wallpaper and stench of rot and mildew to know that the place was circling the drain. Henry had the good sense to pull the plug years ago and, frankly, these people deserved everything they got for pumping the blood back into something that should've stayed in the morgue.

He'd play their game, but he wasn't going to play fair. And he sure as hell wasn't going to make it easy.

Mr. Heinrich Trent did not look amused. He did, however, lean back in his swivel chair and regard him as a predator would prey. That probably wasn't supposed to be funny. But Michael's razor smile was increasingly becoming more of a squiggly line, and god, he wouldn't be able to hold out much longer if the man kept trying to play shark in the kiddie pool.

" _He l—looks like Santa C—Claus!"_ Freddy offered helpfully, and he lost it.

It seemed that fortune smiled upon him that day, because Santa chose that exact moment to take a Very Important Call. One minute went by, then two, then five. Michael spun round and round on his own swivel seat, though his didn't have a high back and wasn't nearly as cool. And then he returned a sombre man, paler too, and there was a tremble in his hands as he eased himself back into his chair.

"Well, it appears you're in luck," he said, echoing Michael's sentiments, and wrestled a limp corpse-smile onto his clammy lips, "I find myself short of staff to fill the night shifts, and need someone to plug those holes—soon."

"I can start today. Now, even," Michael said, his lips curling back into a feral grin. "But I have some… _concerns."_

Santa wet his lips with his tongue. "Oh?"

"You see, while you were monologuing and pacing dramatically behind the desk, I noticed that you left my contract in plain sight and decided to skim through it."

"W—well, it was my intent to go over it with you regardle—"

"Do you realise that there are three pages of fine print alone?" Michael smiled, sickly sweet. "How kind. It warms my shrivelled little heart to think you'd take the time to read over every last point. Look, if you're running a front or something, I don't fucking care. But you and I both know you were going to lie to my face and tell me it's all just legalese and not to worry my pretty little empty head."

Santa wasn't even pretending to smile any more.

"Now this here—" he circled a clause with the pen he took out of Santa's breast pocket. 'I accept that any injury to my person is my responsibility and not that of Fazbear Entertainment.' Because apparently 'injury to his person' was something he should expect from a family pizzeria? "—Concerns me a whole hell of a lot. Is there any reason you feel the need to prevent my nonexistent family from suing you in the event of my gruesome demise?"

Ballora coughed pointedly in his ear.

"How many armed robbers are you expecting to raid a dying kid's restaurant, Heinrich? Can I call you that? Of course I can. There's exactly twenty three dollars and thirty cents in that till. I know because I looked."

Santa sat up straighter, emboldened by the knowledge, the satisfaction of knowing something this troublesome asshole didn't. That maybe if he played his cards right, whatever danger he was trying to conceal would remain just that. Michael would enjoy wiping that little smirk off his face later when he proved him wrong. "It's simply a precaution, Mr. Schmidt," he explained, not quite smoothly. "We have hired individuals in the past who demonstrated a lack of responsibility when alone on the premises, and injured themselves playing with the animatronics and equipment."

"I see," Michael said in a tone that quite clearly said no, he did not see, and if Santa expected him to believe a word of that then he needed to spend more time outside of the North Pole.

"Do you have anything else you'd like to address?"

"Yeah, I fucking do." He flipped the contract, all thirteen pages of it, back to the very first and slapped it back down on the desk with a bang that made Ballora, Freddy, Foxy and Santa all jump. "I don't see minimum hours written anywhere in this and if you expect me to work a zero hour contract, I am walking out of that door right now."

He waited. Santa didn't move. So he stood, throwing down the pen, and was halfway to the door when the man reached out with desperate fingers.

"W—wait! We could start you off on a part-time contract. A—and if you're a good fit for the company, we could look at… keeping you on full-time, sometime in the future? How does that sound?"

Michael flashed him a crooked little grin. Who's the shark, now?

" _S—Santa Claus put you on the naughty list, Mikey."_

"I'm sure he did, but that's okay because he's also on mine. You know, I thought all the secrets went with dad to the grave. But it looks like these assholes have a few of their own."

It turned out that cellphones were a great cover for when he needed to talk to the animatronics without rousing suspicion—much. It was an ugly old brick thing he could've used as a mallet in a pinch—Afton Robotics mastered touchscreen last decade, but he wasn't about to tell anyone that—but it did the trick, and the scattered handful of parents only looked at him with malice instead of forming a mob right there and then.

He couldn't blame them for their distrust, given the restaurant's reputation. But he also couldn't fathom why they were even here. All the other kids decided that Candy's Burger and Fries was the Cool Place To Be the moment that damn cat grinned his way onto the Saturday morning ad slots. Of course their precious darlings had to be the oddballs that actually liked the murder pizzeria.

" _Are you sure about this?"_ Ballora said, uncertainty in her voice. _"Something feels… very wrong here."_

"That'll just make it so much more satisfying to bring it all crashing down on their heads."

" _Unlike you, I am not motivated solely by spite."_

"It grows on you."

In Freddy's heyday, Michael would've had to fight tooth and nail and elbow to get anywhere near the main stage. The patrons, young and old and somewhere vaguely inbetween, were once packed in like sardines, jostling to see it all up close and personal. To witness for themselves something that was once a marvel, something that captured the imagination of a nation, animals that walked and talked and almost seemed to breathe. Now it was a stroll across a barren floor, without even tables to block his way. Those were over by the entrance, set well back from the stage and its unsettling, glassy-eyed performers. And the _smell._

Yeah, they were the originals all right. The Fredbear and Friends animatronics. A half to a whole that could never be, saved from the scrapper by men too cheap to invest in current models, without care for their legacy and all the horrors that came with it. Something crawled in his heart like a snake bearing its fangs, but he crushed it underfoot before it could strike. He was done being sentimental.

God, the things reeked like rotting flesh. They could've at least dry-cleaned the costumes before opening day.

"Hey," he said to Freddy, as if to an old friend. "Long time no see."

The bear's speech hitched, which was odd, really, given that all the audio was played from a reel somewhere behind the stage. And maybe it was just a trick of those tasteless rainbow lights they had set to strobe overhead, but he was sure those lifeless eyes rolled in their sockets to stare at him.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: I'm not dead! I just ran out of motivation—and ran into writer's block. I know this chapter is short but I figured a small update was better than no update at all while I'm finding my feet again.**

* * *

Now, Michael was not one to balk at the odd health code violation. These seedy little pizza joints ran on bellybutton lint and hopes and dreams, and couldn't afford such luxuries as 'windows' or 'ventilation', or the fabled beast, the 'janitor'. But when he found out that he would be working inside a bunker straight out of the Cold War, he had questions. A lot of questions.

"I might be committing treason," he mused while he entertained Funtime Freddy and Foxy with the security doors. Open, shut, open, shut. Because of course they needed eight-inch steel magnetically locked doors for this one room in particular. Was he the unwitting guinea pig for some kind of Russian superweapon? Eh. Unimportant. What was important was that when plugging in their weird pizza bunker, they apparently decided to hook it up to a battery instead of mains. Maybe he should stop messing with the doors.

He opened both with the remote switch he cobbled together from stuff he found in the drawers, and left them that way. "Any luck?" He said into the air, leaning back in the swivel chair he stole from the manager's office. He was right; it was much more comfortable.

" _There is little of note,"_ came Ballora's answer, sniffish. _"The security records are routinely wiped, and that is all that is kept on this system."_

"So you're saying I've got to get into Santa's personal computer."

" _You must get into Santa's personal computer,"_ she agreed.

Hmm. Michael chewed on another forkful of cold chow-mein while he considered his options. On the one hand, something was going on here and legally signing away his right to life in some dodgy fucking paperwork was just the first clue. And, well, he was curious. On the other, he was already comfortable, and walking down the hall to Santa's workshop seemed like an awful lot of effort.

Something crashed in the depths of the building.

"Mmf—the fuf w'tha?"

" _Don't talk with your mouth full."_

" _Maybe it was a ghost,"_ Freddy offered.

"Holy fucking shit, Fred, you do know where we are right?" Michael threw down his fork and stood. "Right, we're going on a sweep. Ballora, watch the cameras and call me if anything weird happens. Freddy, Foxy, you're coming with me because I trust neither of you with my life or with important equipment."

" _Yaay!"_

* * *

"Y'know, when you said 'everything' I didn't think you'd, like, go into a play by play of eating takeout in your office." Mac dunked a piece of cake thing into his coffee, eyebrows pinching together when the whole thing immediately disintegrated.

"Everything means everything, or do you want me to stop? Because I can go the fuck home."

"No, no, I was just like—nevermind."

Silence settled over the room. A prickly, uncomfortable sort of silence, like handling a rattlesnake with barbecue tongs, cut short only by the sound of a backfiring car—or maybe it was a gunshot, hard to say these days. Normally silence was a rare thing to be treasured for the short while it lasted. But this one overstayed its welcome, and Michael was just opening his mouth to talk over it when Mac cut across him again.

"So they were… really the originals? The first?"

Michael eyed him over his coffee. "The first ones that you'd recognise as a Freddy Fazbear's animatronic. There were… others, before that."

"What were they like?"

"Honestly? Big, chunky things that just kind of shuffled in place and waved their arms a bit. They were going through a 'less is more' phase." It felt… empty, to be referring to Henry—and to _him—_ as nothing more than 'they'. As if they were merely strangers, and all they had suffered and caused others to suffer was just stories he'd heard through the grapevine.

He didn't like it, he realised. To be telling this story, his story, but with nothing of him in it.

"... What I wouldn't give to get hold of one of those," Mac was saying, gazing in doe-eyed wonder through the mists of time at what he presumably thought the classics looked like. He thought wrong. People always did.

"You just met one of the killer animatronics—did you learn _nothing?"_

"That…" Mac's face made shapes around the concept, pushing out into a pout, pulling into a frown. Scrunching up when it wouldn't fit, no matter which way he turned it. Until, finally, it did, and his mouth dropped open in horror. "Oh god, that—that was the real thing."

"Did you really just figure that out? Really?"

"Are there more of those things?"

"Mac, buddy, my man," Michael told him with a look of utmost pity, "why the hell do you think I'm telling you this story?"

* * *

"This is a problem."

Well, it used to be a spotlight. Maybe. If Michael squinted and turned his head. Now, though, it was just that: a problem.

The circle of his flashlight glittered over the floor, over confetti and foil party hats scattered from the tables. And glass, so much glass. It crunched underfoot as he picked his way over the remains; he tried not to think about how much it sounded like bones. _Crunch._ Reflected in every shard was the LED on the camera overlooking the room from the stage, a thousand red eyes blinking on and off, on and off, watching him. It was Ballora looking through those eyes, but that didn't explain the hair that stood on end on his arms and neck.

" _... Maybe it was another ghost?"_

"Only if ghosts carry baseball bats and chains."

Crack, crunch. The wandering circle came to rest on the stage and its occupants. Two pairs of eyes caught the light. And that, he realised, was an even bigger problem.

"You know," he commented, "I always did wonder when they were going to kick Bonnie out of the band."

Give a robot a pair of functioning legs and it's bound to walk off at some point. The issue here was that these ones were never designed to walk at all. He felt eyes pricking his back the moment he turned away from the stage.

His phone was out of his pocket and in his hand before it could finish one bar of the Imperial March. "Something up?"

" _From the trail of debris on the cameras, Bonnie appears to be making his way to the office."_

Fuck.

"Sit tight, princess, we're coming to get you."

" _I am not a—"_

Michael hung up before she could finish protesting and hopscotched back the way he came. Off went the flashlight—no use painting a giant target on his back—and he bent to pluck a fallen mic stand from the floor to serve as a makeshift weapon. Old, felt solid. Sometimes buying everything second hand had its advantages.

The west hall was empty. He hugged the wall, where he might be mistaken for a shadow, if oddly shaped. And he crept onwards, slowly, every nerve, every muscle straining to _go._ Patience. He'd done this before. That's why he was here.

A hulking figure lurched out of the office, swallowing the trickle of pale light in its teeth. Fat, segmented limbs, like a spider. A spider with a thousand red eyes glittering out of the floor.

 _GO._

He kicked off from the wall. It heard the slap of his boots before it saw him and by then he was driving the stand into the broad curve of its chest. It spun on its feet and he went with it, threw his weight into the turn. Pivoted, and its momentum sent it into the floor—and him through the open door of the office.

 _Clang._ The door slammed down on his fallen weapon. He added a microphone stand to his mental tally of things broken on his first night on the job.

" _That,"_ said Freddy, _"w—was AWESOME."_

Michael threw himself into the office chair and shut the other door for good measure. He let out a shuddering breath, but not all of the adrenaline went with it. So he let his hands curl themselves into fists and he waited until he came down from the high.

" _I didn't need rescuing,"_ Ballora's voice came, huffily, from the computer speakers. _"And that was dangerous."_

"All the awesome things are." As Foxy chattered agreements in dolphin, Michael blinked the blood haze from his eyes until the monitors swam back, forth, and then into focus. Error logs scrolled without end—were they on screen, or behind his eyes? He blinked again. Definitely on screen. "Found something?" He asked, leaning forward to watch what Ballora was up to.

" _I'm making necessary adjustments."_

Live footage from every camera in the building tiled across one monitor. On the other, Ballora marked out reference points from the feed, measured them against each other, then marked again, until soon enough she had a map, to scale, of every room in the building that she could see. The whole place and everything in it, right here in front of him. He could kiss her.

"Bless you, you even included the toilets."

The west door rattled as something heavy and fist-shaped slammed into it from the other side.

"So that's what those are for," Michael observed as a rabbit-eared shadow limped its way past the window and out of sight. When the shuff-thunk of dragging feet faded into the dark, he flicked both doors open. There had to be a way to rewire this whole fucking system. He didn't know what bean-counting cheapskate thought a bigass battery was a good way of saving money when night tariffs were a thing _,_ but that man had blood on his hands.

All these fuckers did.

He spun on the chair. That felt good. "We need a plan," he said, drumming his fingers on the arms as he stared down the posters pinned to the back wall. Freddy, the old Freddy, stared back.

Foxy chittered.

"I don't know where you're getting the idea that C4 is cheap, but I like your thinking." He spun again. "But we still need to get into all those juicy forbidden files before we go blowing anything up."

" _I can mark their positions on the map in real time as I see them."_

"That's a start." His eyes drifted back to the little red blip, flickering across the screen. It was pacing in the main hall. Back and forth, back and forth. Here and there it would jump, erratic, when it passed from the view of one camera and into another. "But all this takes power, which, as it turns out, is currently a finite resource. We need to get into the mains—and that means going back out there."

" _A—and more fi—fighting?"_

"Yeah," he said, watching Bonnie claw at his own face on the cameras, mouth open in a silent scream. "More fighting."

* * *

"So what do you know about them?"

"Huh?" Mac blinked.

Michael dipped one pinky in his coffee and licked it. "The missing kids. How much do you even know about them?"

And he had to think about that, really think. Neatly divide the fact from the fiction, the embellished from the raw, ugly truth. Michael could see on his face how little he had of the latter. It was interesting to watch him try, to deal it all out like poker chips—then justify to himself why his winnings were so small. "They were killed, right?" He said at last, slowly. Like he was waiting for him to scream 'WRONG' and stamp an F on his report card. "At one of the old places… the really old ones."

"Who doesn't know that?" Michael ignored the wince his words left. But ripping Mac's guilty little guts out and tripping him up with them stopped being fun a while ago. He sighed, watching the dregs spin in lazy circles around the bottom of his mug. Watching it all stain black. And when it was cold, cold as him, he turned his gaze back on the only other person in the room.

The only living person. There were others, yes, jostling for space in his head and a hard drive on his belt. And the ghosts were there, always there, shackled to his ankles.

"They were my friends."


End file.
